Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Marriage had given the virginal Godwin a taste for sensual pleasure; wooing the middle-aged Harriet Lee, he warned her against the atrophying effects of celibacy while he extolled the ‘Promethean fire’ sparked by affection and parental love.5 But the children and the care of them were his main concerns. ‘The poor children!’ he wrote to Mary Wollstonecraft’s old friend Mrs Cotton shortly after his wife’s death. In theory, few men were better equipped to educate their daughters than Godwin; in practice, he mournfully acknowledged that he lacked the proper experience and understanding by which ‘to direct the infant mind. I am the most unfit person for this office; she was the best qualified in the world. What a change.’6

  Rejections did not discourage him from the search for a woman who would cherish and supervise the little girls. His need to find a wife was strengthened by a well-founded fear that Mary Wollstonecraft’s sisters, disapproving of the Memoirs and terrified of the book’s possible effect on the reputation of the school they had opened in Dublin, might hit back by staking a claim to Fanny and baby Mary. To lose his pets to a couple of grim and hostile aunts in Ireland was an intolerable prospect.

  In the absence of a mother, Fanny and Mary were nevertheless surrounded by loving attention. Louisa Jones, with whose sisters Godwin stayed when he began courting Harriet Lee in Bath, presided over the Polygon as housekeeper and nurse for the first fifteen months of Mary’s life. An awkwardness which arose when Miss Jones became involved with a protégé of Godwin’s, John Arnot, was resolved by a new arrangement in which Miss Jones moved out and visited on a daily basis. Marguerite Fourneé, Mary Wollstonecraft’s maid, who had cared for Fanny since babyhood, stayed on in the house and continued to help out after marrying a French neighbour at the close of 1799; Cooper, a cheerful nursemaid who doted on Mary, supervised their daily routine. Eliza Fenwick, a mother herself and one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s staunchest admirers, kept a fond eye on the little girls.

  Godwin’s family, to whom he had always been so unstintingly kind, took a strong interest in the new baby. Mary saw her aunt Hannah every fortnight when she came to dine at the Polygon; uncles and young cousins dropped in to inspect her, while the number of visits made by Godwin’s good-hearted but imprudent sister-in-law Harriet (Joseph’s wife) suggests that she often helped out with nursing duties. Anthony Carlisle, refusing to take any payment for his calls, was able to advise when the children were ill and when, alarmingly, Mary suffered a dangerous fall in the first four months of her life.

  The excitement of a new grandchild could not tempt old Mrs Godwin away from the Norfolk farm where wartime conditions had reduced them to a diet of meal, bread and pancakes, but Mary provided a diversion from her continuing worries about Hannah’s lack of religion, Harriet’s spendthrift ways and Natty’s failure to find a wife or a steady job. Between thanking Godwin for getting a nephew into the Bluecoat School and fretting over the awful vision of penniless Godwins adrift in a city of vice and playgoing, Ann deluged the Polygon with gifts and questions. Had Mary been weaned yet? Was she being properly fed? Had Godwin remembered his late wife’s sensible views on the benefit to children of fresh air and exercise? She knitted socks and mittens; she sent material for making little dresses; she lavished gifts. A garnet set in enamel was followed by an amethyst set between two ‘sparks’ and a precious snuffbox, a family treasure, which Godwin put away for his daughter with the tresses of Mary Wollstonecraft’s hair and a ring which had belonged to Fanny Blood, her mother’s dearest friend.

  Women naturally gathered where there were motherless babies to be cherished, but the tall house in the Polygon also attracted a number of men more interested in talking to Godwin than seeing his daughters. William Hazlitt, whose family had a long history of friendship with the Godwins, made frequent visits; so did an observant young lawyer, Henry Crabb Robinson, whose diaries still carry a faint aromatic whirl of pipe-smoke between their tightly packed pages. The year 1800 also marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between Godwin and Charles Lamb. A small, pale, nervous-mannered young man with a disproportionately large and noble head, Lamb earned his living as a clerk at East India House and with his elder sister Mary kept a home as oddly cheerful as any from a novel by Dickens. Gin, whist and smoking were Lamb’s modest vices. Volatile and bright as a dragonfly in his rapid, charmingly inconsequential conversation, Lamb easily masked the sadness of living with a sister he adored but who, from time to time, reverted to madness – the madness which had, in 1796, led her to kill their mother, to whom she had been a devoted child. More than a little unbalanced himself, Lamb was intrigued and sometimes alarmed by Godwin’s eccentric behaviour; he was unaware of how anxiously his host was recording the spates of ‘deliquium’ which often afflicted him after his wife’s death. They added to Godwin’s fears for the children. Carlisle sensibly advised him to take a rest from his work; Godwin was too poor and too conscientious to listen.

  James Marshall was a regular presence in the Polygon as Godwin’s secretary and general factotum; gentle and affectionate, he was regarded almost as a second father by the children. Characters like Collins the gardener are too shadowy to distinguish. But the visitor who took to them most strongly from the first was the Lambs’ beloved friend, Samuel Coleridge. Red-lipped, large-eyed and so brilliant in his unstoppable loquacity that even Godwin, who liked to guide conversation, sat and listened, Coleridge erupted into their lives like a meteor in the winter of 1799. He came for meals and stayed for days. The habit of daily prayer with the children at the end of each day, though it needed the atheistical Godwin’s acquiescence, was probably Coleridge’s introduction. His recital one evening of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ left Mary, hiding behind a sofa when she should have been in bed, with an unforgettable memory of an icebound sea and a man haunted by the swift, unstoppable treading in his wake of ‘a frightful fiend’. The image stuck; it haunts the story of Frankenstein.

  A new father himself, Coleridge was overcome by the pathos of the little motherless Godwins, whose unchildlike silence appalled him when he first met them. ‘Kisses for Mary and Fanny – God love them!’ he wrote after his move to the Lake District in the spring of 1800.7 When his second child was born – Godwin gently declined the role of godfather – Coleridge could think of no finer compliment than to see a resemblance in Derwent’s charming plumpness to pretty little Mary.8 Disappointed by Godwin’s refusal to be tempted away from the city into cottage bliss at Keswick, Coleridge comforted himself with memories of their pleasant conversations in the book-lined study of the Polygon, with Mary Wollstonecraft’s portrait staring serenely down on them. Godwin was kind, he wrote, to thank him for having softened his emotions, but credit was due elsewhere:

  as to your poetic and physiopathic feelings, I more than suspect that dear little Fanny and Mary have had more to do in that business than I. Hartley sends his love to Mary. ‘What? & not to Fanny?’ ‘Yes – and to Fanny – but I’ll have Mary.’9

  Two months after Coleridge’s departure, Godwin decided to leave the children and the redecorating of his house in James Marshall’s care while he went to Dublin. Godwin’s references to ‘special’ reasons for his first departure from English shores suggest that this was more than a pleasure trip. The Wollstonecraft sisters had finally raised the question he dreaded, of whether they should not take over the care of one or both of the children.

  Godwin had no intention of handing either Fanny or Mary, let alone both, to the women who had, despite long histories of dependence on their late sister for help and encouragement – shown no enthusiasm for her achievements. The portrait he had painted of Mary Wollstonecraft in the Memoirs stood between them. Godwin was proud of his sincerity; Eliza and Everina regarded it as unforgivable. This difficult encounter was the only flaw in an enjoyable holiday. Godwin’s letters to Marshall report with undisguised delight his pleasure in a new friendship with the barrister John Curran (‘wild, ferocious, jocular, humorous, mimetic and kittenish; a true Irishman …�
��) and in dining with ‘three countesses’.10 Godwin’s cynical view of Burke’s reverence for the aristocracy did not make him immune to the charms of a title.

  One of the three noble ladies was the former Margaret King, the little girl his wife had loved enough to dream of adopting when she went to Mitchelstown as a governess. Margaret was now Lady Mountcashell, a married lady with a brood of children on whom to practise Wollstonecraft’s educational methods. Godwin, once he had recovered from the shock of a six-foot countess who dressed from choice as drably as Eliza Fenwick did from necessity, and whose muscular arms were naked almost to the shoulders of her grey gown, was ready to admire her republican spirit as much as her educational methods. Coleridge belonged to the old school of thought which held that children were adorable and transferable playthings; Margaret Mountcashell was the first woman Godwin had met since his wife’s death to reassure him that his own approach was absolutely right. ‘In what you say concerning the propriety of treating children with mildness, kindness and respect, you express exactly the opinions I have long entertained,’ she wrote shortly after his return to England.11 Like Godwin, she believed in the need to teach children ‘as early as possible to think for themselves … My greatest object is to make my children happy and virtuous …’12 This aim was good enough as far as quiet, depressive Fanny was concerned; Godwin believed that his own daughter was destined for higher things.

  Godwin may have relished the prospect of a break from parental care; he soon found himself missing the caressing company of his little girls. The letters he wrote to James Marshall disclose a tenderness and easy intimacy strikingly at odds with the severe fathers of some of Mary’s later fictions. ‘You do not tell me whether they have received or paid any visits,’ he reproached Marshall, before urging him to tell Mary that ‘papa will soon come back again and look out at the coach-window and see the Polygon across two fields from the trunks of the trees at Camden Town. Will Fanny and Mary come to meet me?’ Fanny was promised six kisses if she would help Mr Collins in the garden and keep some strawberries and beans for him. ‘But then Mary must have six too, because Fanny has six.’13 He wanted them to know that he thought of them every day and that he had seen no children in Ireland half so lovable as his own.14 Love could never entirely quell the educator; he also wanted to know how Fanny’s reading was progressing (she was still on a spelling book at the age of six) and to have the children follow his route home on maps.

  *

  Fanny and Mary lived in a country which was at war with France, but they were surrounded by the chatter of French voices every time they were taken out of the house. The churchyard where their mother was buried was full of French graves; in the two local hospices run by their kindly neighbour, Abbé Carron, old Frenchmen chanted their morning and evening prayers. When Mary followed Fanny to a nearby day-school at the age of four,‡ their playmates were the children of emigré parents, all, naturally, in favour of England’s war against a regime which had forced them into exile. Carron called Somers Town ‘little France’; to the less well-disposed, it was ‘Botany Bay’.

  Somers Town was well organized under the tireless care of Carron, but it never became fashionable. Only one conveyance a day linked it to London and it had the disadvantage of being unpleasantly close to the smoking brickfields which marked the city’s slow western march towards Paddington village. But the area was full of life. Watchmakers, goldsmiths and engravers worked behind the windows at street-level; the local volunteer corps, smartly equipped with red, white and blue uniforms, paraded up and down banging drums, blowing whistles and, in their weekly target practice, firing muskets until they were disbanded for subversive behaviour in 1804. A crippled and half-witted muffin-seller, informally known as the Mayor of Garratt, trundled his cart around the square enclosing the Polygon’s graceful circle of houses until the nightwatchman began his rounds.

  Peeping from the nursery windows at the top of No. 29 The Polygon, Fanny and Mary could look down on the circle of tidily divided gardens behind the house to watch Mr Collins laying the strawberry nets or staking out a bean row. They could see across the fields of Twenty Acres and Fig’s Mead to where the tall elms swayed their heads above Camden Town; north-west of them, the bald high dome of Primrose Hill jutted above the fields, looking ever so slightly like Mr Godwin’s head. Sometimes, a flash of light and a soft explosion told them that a duel – rarely fatal on this site – was taking place outside Mother Red Cap’s tavern at Chalk Farm, known better to Fanny and Mary as the place where they went to drink syllabubs or to see a cow being milked; once, a manned balloon came sailing across the sky from Vauxhall’s pleasure gardens, to land in one of the fields just north of their home.

  Visits to the city and its entertainments were rare events. Fanny, at the age of four, was taken to a children’s play and, with Marshall in attendance, to admire the grotto made by Alexander Pope at Twickenham. Mary, too young for such treats, became familiar with the sandy footpath to St Pancras churchyard where, when she had spelled out the letters on the stone marking her mother’s grave, she was free to explore.§ As a small girl, she probably took most pleasure in peering through the churchyard fence at the clear, bubbling waters of the Fleet river, still sweet at Somers Town before it began its long inglorious plunge towards the Thames as the dirtiest open sewer in London.

  These regular visits to the churchyard helped strengthen Mary’s sense of the mother she only knew through Opie’s portrait. The little book of ‘Lessons’ in which she featured as baby William was probably the first she read. Even before she could puzzle out the words of Original Stories, the collection of tales Mary Wollstonecraft had written for her pupil in Ireland, Mary could admire the delicately engraved illustrations which the publisher had commissioned for the second and more expensive edition from William Blake, then at the beginning of his artistic career. One showed a mother standing between two little girls, imaginably Fanny and herself. Another showed two dead children lying under the gaze of a tall, gaunt man, not quite human. Someone must have read Mary the accompanying story, of how the man ran away from civilization to live alone, dependent on the kindness of passing strangers. Was it here that the idea of Frankenstein was born?

  It would seem absurd to be searching for the sources of an eighteen-year-old girl’s novel in the impressions of a child if the child’s life had been an ordinary one. But Mary’s was not ordinary. Quicker and more impressionable than Fanny, she was shown off to visitors as a Mary Wollstonecraft in the making and brought into the parlour to listen to the conversation of her father and his friends.

  Science and physicianship were frequent topics of conversation in Godwin’s home, especially when Anthony Carlisle, a staunch believer in medical experiments, was visiting. She was six years old when Carlisle came to the Polygon with a story which no search for Frankenstein’s origins can overlook.

  It was customary for the bodies of murderers hanged at Newgate to be handed over to doctors for dissection at anatomy theatres. In February 1803, the Annual Register reported an experiment on one such victim by John (Giovanni) Aldini which had taken place in front of an assembly of ‘professional gentlemen’. Nothing would have kept Carlisle from being there to observe an experiment by the man who was locked in combat with Volta over the question of whether the body contained an electrical ‘vital’ fluid. Aldini had already shown that he could make a decapitated mastiff kick its legs while the head clashed its jaws in audible rage; on this occasion, a vast machine comprising two hundred and forty metal plates was wired to the corpse’s head. This was the result, a disconcerting one even for such a sceptic as Carlisle.

  On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye actually opened. In the subsequent course of the experiment, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion, and it appeared to all the bystanders that the wretched man was on the point of being
restored to life.15

  The experiment was hurriedly terminated. When repeated at a later date, the corpse jerked up an arm and struck one of the observers in the eye. To a man with Anthony Carlisle’s interest in the advancement of medicine,16 and to Godwin, whose most recent subject (in St Leon) had been the danger of seeking ways to prolong life, this offered rich matter for discussion. Electricity’s power to animate seemed beyond doubt, but law restricted medical experiments of this kind to the corpses of felons. What if Aldini went further? What if he succeeded in restoring the body of such a villain – the man had been hanged for murdering his spouse – to life?

  Notes

  1. MWS, The Mourner’ (1830), CTS.

  2. MWS, ‘The Elder Son’ (1835), CTS.

  3. MWS, Lodore (1835), 1, iii.

  4. MWS–PBS, 18.10.1817.

  5. WG–Harriet Lee, June 1798 (Godwin, 1, pp. 303–4).

  6. WG–Mrs Cotton, 24.10.1797 (ibid., p. 281).

  7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (hereafter STC)–WG, 8.9.1800, and hereafter, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford University Press, 1956–71).

  8. STC–WG, 6.12.1800.

  9. STC–WG, 21.5.1800.

  10. WG–James Marshall, 11.7.1800 (Abinger, Dep. c. 214).

  11. Margaret Mountcashell–WG, 9.9.1800 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  12. Margaret Mountcashell–WG, 6.8.1800 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  13. WG–James Marshall, 11.7.1800 (Abinger, Dep. c. 214).